Other tools for PbP games?

[Merkuri]

I think the bare minimum would not be that hard to do in theory (I've obviously not tried it myself).

Bare minimum, you need to associate one large image and multiple smaller images with a thread. You need a grid (honestly, this is probably the hardest thing to do). You need to associate each of the smaller images with grid coordinates. Then in each post that shows the map you need to just draw the large image, the grid, and each small image with their grid coordinates.

Heck, you could represent the individual post maps with BBCode that might look something like this:

[PBPMap][token1]1,5[/token1][token2]3,6[/token2][token3]-1,0[/token3][/PBPMap]

And then let the poster adjust the token positions as needed by re-typing some of that BBCode.

The rest is just gravy and could probably be implemented a little at a time as you get the time/resources for it. This would obviously not be secure, but as a bare-bones PBP battlemap system I think it would be fine. It's less important that the battlemap be secure than it is for dice rolls to be secure.

 

[pneumatik]

I've been thinking about how to implement an online battlemat easily and cheaply. I would build a table of square cells with cellpadding = 0 and cellspacing = a couple of pixels. The cellspacing would be colored black or white to make the grid. Each cell would have its own square image that exactly fills a table cell. The edge cells would have numbers or letters in them for reference. And that's the starting battlemat.

There would also be icons for PCs, monsters, whatever. They'd have a transparent background and would also go centered in a cell. So now you have a battlemat with stuff on it.

To build the battlemat you tell the site how large you want it to be (or there could just be a standard size) and it generates an empty table with a checkbox in each cell. Below the table would be a a set of images. You'd check boxes in all the cells you want a particular background and and then click the background to put it in all those cells. Once you've filled all the cells with background you'd go to a similar screen with the icons to place in cells over the background images. Ultimately you want to be able to put multiple icons on top of each other for stuff like grappling and tiny monsters. Hopefully ENWorld could get someone to make some basic map tiles, but people should be able to upload their own images sets, too.

The simple version of permissions is to restrict editing to just the DM or allow anyone to change anything. The awesome version would be to let the DM move everyone and players only move their icons. Maybe they could also upload those icons themselves. To move you just go into the "edit" mode for the battlemat, click your icon, and then click the square you want it to move to.

More awesomeness would allow you to set mouseover or popup text (like the site's xp popup) for each icon to keep up to date with PCs. Even better would be to make that text editable directly, so you could edit HPs or mark off cast spells or annotate buffs directly from the battlemat.

So, yeah, that's a wall of text, but I think the html is at least straightforward. There's no fiddly adjustments to make things line up and no image processing for the site to do. I have no idea how hard it would be to program though.

 

[darjr]

I wonder if google maps could be of any use?

 

[Maidhc O Casain]

I see nothing there that doesn't look easy to do here with a little time.

Although I don't understand how the character sheets there work - are they simply uploading images of their character sheets, doing character generation, or entering the data into forms, or what?

As far as I know there's not a sheet for Pathfinder characters, so for those I use a plain text format and ask my players to fill it in.

One of the users has developed a really nice web-based 4E sheet. No calculations, you enter your info into a form in his web site and it inserts your entries into the html code for the sheet. You copy the code and paste it onto your character page. The output looks like this.

Other than that I really don't know what's out there in the way of character sheets.

 

[Morrus]

As far as I know there's not a sheet for Pathfinder characters, so for those I use a plain text format and ask my players to fill it in.

One of the users has developed a really nice web-based 4E sheet. No calculations, you enter your info into a form in his web site and it inserts your entries into the html code for the sheet. You copy the code and paste it onto your character page. The output looks like this.

Other than that I really don't know what's out there in the way of character sheets.

It sounds eminently possible, then, as long as we can find someone do to that initial formatting/layout. Who did it? Maybe they'd be open to a little freelance layout work.

 

[Maidhc O Casain]

Great! I think it's awesome that you're looking at this. I run two campaigns, and play in 5 or 6 more. The campaign management and aliases look like they'll be extremely helpful to me.

It's been mentioned before, but I'll reiterate it - an integrated battlemat would be awesome!

 

[evilbob]

I've been thinking about how to implement an online battlemat easily and cheaply...

Can't you already put background images on a table? That would solve a lot of the complicated stuff you had.

As for the images, honestly I'd assume that ENworld just provided the framework and others provided the images. However, that leads me to another idea:

- a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to

Basically, a shared store space for useful files. It'd need to be organized well and if that's too crazy of an idea you could limit it to a few files, but having a common set of useful tokens would be nice. Then again, maybe it's silly to replicate parts of the internet - but on the other hand, the idea is to keep people on this site, right?

 

[Velmont]

- a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to

I totally agree with that idea.

 

[renau1g]

- a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to

Just gotta watch out for copyright issues.

 

[Arkhandus]

And, uh, [MENTION=29098]Rhun[/MENTION] and [MENTION=84167]HolyMan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=13966]Arkhandus[/MENTION], getthehellouthere!

Oh! The one thing that drives me the most crazy is when sigs aren't displayed while I'm composing a post. That's where I keep handy links to the rogue's gallery and OOC thread (with campaign reference). If there would be some way to keep the link to the main campaign page while composing a post it would be super-awesome.

Yes, you rang?

I'm too busy this week to read through this thread or provide any significant input. But I do agree that it would be nice if we could still see signatures while composing or editing a post, since I keep a lot of campaign-related links in my sig.

On another note, I don't particularly want to have to find and install Plugins for Firefox just to see, let alone edit, any posts or sheets or the like. -_- I won't be able to afford a new computer until at least December, at the very earliest, and probably more like next summer or next fall, so I'm stuck running IE6 and Firefox 2 as my only web-browsers on this outdated machine/OS. Can't update my Flash player to the most-recent versions either due to my old OS. Though I doubt the average ENWorlder has the same kinda old machine and cashflow issues I do, it is possible that others are stuck running old OS's/browsers too.